


Ill-Defined Words

by scioscribe



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Difficult Pregnancy, F/F, Fpreg, Hurt/Comfort, Iddy Iddy Bang Bang 2019, Sibling Incest, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-17 20:29:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20627090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Gamora had never treated her like a sister, and Nebula had never treated her like a lover.Except now she’d fathered Gamora’s child, so Gamora’s definition of them had won in the end.  Chalk up one more victory for daddy’s favorite.But then she thought of how Gamora had held her hand against her stomach as she’d said,It’s yours; this thing inside her belonged to them both.  They’d never shared anything before.  Thanos had made them sisters and he’d been the one to decide what that meant, that cauldron-boil of hatred and envy.  He’d made sure they were never equal.  But he hadn’t been in bed with them.  Whatever else this was, it was theirs—and she had some claim to it.





	Ill-Defined Words

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe) in the [iibb2019](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/iibb2019) collection. 

> **Prompt:**
> 
> Gamora/Nebula fuckbuddies-to-lovers with fpreg.
> 
> Unplanned, difficult pregnancy; discussion of abortion; implicit discussion of possible infanticide. Incest angst.

Rocket redid the circuitry in Gamora’s side, patching the torn fibers and carefully and painstakingly making the connection filaments more flexible. The work needed precision, so he wore amplifying goggles with a headlamp array; when his gaze met hers, his eyes looked bright and enormous.

“So,” he said. “Knocked up, huh?”

She lay back, looking up at the ceiling. “Apparently.”

On Zen-Whoberi, centuries ago, pregnancies had been called fulfillments. The body reserved all compatible genetic material until some constantly shifting internal hormone map was perfectly calibrated to bring a child to term; bodies under considerable stress could not conceive without supplements. She wondered sometimes what generation gap Thanos had left behind him, as the survivors of her halved world had feared and mourned and felt fulfillment of any kind beyond them.

She’d never gone back, not even now. She couldn’t see those skies again. Couldn’t stand in the dust where Thanos had murdered millions—and then somehow earned her love anyway.

So she was stuck with a very limited store of information. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant, not for sure, until her midsection had thickened and the seam of metal crossing her ribs had split from her skin, the stretch breaking wires and sending sparks flying out of her.

She remembered the sudden ripple of pain and the way she’d gritted her teeth and fallen back against the wall. Peter had held her hand bruisingly tight, yelling for the others to get there _now_.

Peter saying, “Gamora, hey, Gamora, where’s it hurt? What’s the problem?”

She’d tried to answer, but it had only come out as a low hiss. She’d gestured at her side and he’d yanked the laces free of her shirt, rucking it up, breathing out _fuck_ in a soft voice. She’d been all blood and loose couplings.

They’d moved her into their makeshift infirmary and run a scanner over her.

“Recognition: Gamora. Analysis: damage to cybernetic circuitry along right side, laceration wound due to damage. Pregnancy advanced approximately thirteen weeks.”

So here she was.

Rocket finished and lifted the goggles, letting them rest against his ears. His face was almost grave. “Thirteen weeks ago, as far as I can remember, we had exactly jack on our schedules. So I can play a guessing game and narrow down the candidates, or I figure you can just tell me.”

“The timeline isn’t relevant,” Gamora said. She went on tracing a crack in the ceiling while she explained.

“So it could be anybody,” Rocket said. “I mean, anybody you ever did the horizontal tango with.”

“Yes.” But there’d been only one person. She swung her legs off the cot and stood. “I can talk to everyone.”

The rest of her friends were huddled in the corridor right outside their cramped little infirmary, and the sight warmed Gamora while also giving her a pinprick of annoyance: their love and support was why she’d grown comfortable enough to be in this mess in the first place. She had never imagined a life without fear and strain carved into the foundations. Thanos had brought death to her world, to her soul, and he had taught her to bring death to the universe. He had _reworked _her to that purpose. The idea that, after all that, she could kindle life inside herself—she’d never even considered it.

She wrapped her arms around herself, a self-protective gesture she hadn’t been allowed since she was a child. She wanted to hide herself under something, under a blanket or one of Peter’s absurd baggy sweaters.

“I am Groot,” Groot said, his voice a kind of unfurling chirp. There was a question there.

Gamora made herself smile. “Yes, I’m fine now.”

“Yeah, I make a pretty good people mechanic,” Rocket said.

“Your body should not spontaneously rip itself apart, even in pregnancy,” Drax said. “If it’s starting to do that, we should all be very concerned.”

“It isn’t.” She tightened her hands on her arms; there was a kind of primitive comfort in being sure of what was hurting her. “Rocket loosened everything. I should be able to get through this without any more—ripping.”

“So you’re keeping it,” Peter said. He had a look on his face that she’d started to recognize as something quintessentially, strangely him, like he was digging around in the messiness of his heart until he found whatever he needed there; what he came up with was a slightly unsteady smile. “I don’t even have the first clue how we’re going to baby-proof this place. You think we could just stick your kid in a clay pot until it’s, like, a kindergartener? Because that worked out okay with Groot.”

“Do you reproduce by yourself?” Mantis said.

She sounded as innocent as ever, but for the first time, Gamora thought the naivete might be more niceness than anything else: Mantis was giving her an out in case she didn’t want to explain.

But this was her family. And if she was going to add to their number, she wanted to do it as honestly as she could. She felt the blunt curves of her fingernails cutting into her skin. “No. It’s Nebula’s.”

“You mated with your sister?” Drax said.

At least he sounded more confused than disgusted. “It was years ago. I didn’t ever think this would happen.”

“Hey,” Rocket said, smacking his hand lightly against her leg. “Ease up, you’re gonna make yourself bleed and ruin all my hard work.”

“We didn’t have anyone else.” She could hear the way her voice ratcheted up, ragged and desperate.

Peter stepped forward and loosened her hold on herself, prying her fingers up one by one; he handled her firmly, not delicately, and she found the touch reassuring. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Hey. Don’t tell me you’re trying to beat my record for adolescent sexual weirdness, okay? It’s going to hurt my feelings.”

“You have the advantage over Gamora,” Drax said. “You’ve stretched out your adolescent behavior to a much greater length.”

Peter shook his head, not looking back over his shoulder. His eyes were still on her. “Whatever you did to get through Thanos, if it helped you get to us, I’m glad you did it. Fuck it. I mean, come on, sister-on-sister pregnancy, that’s like a _Tuesday _on a Ravagers ship. Whatever you need, that’s what we want you to have. _Right, _everybody?”

“I am Groot.”

“Exactly. See, Groot gets it.” He squeezed her shoulders and then stepped back. He rubbed his hands together. “Okay, minus the emotional support, I’ve kind of got nothing here. What do you do about babies? Do we have to go get Nebula?”

“Do you want us to go get Nebula?” Rocket asked almost mildly. “Because just ’cause Quill’s zoomed right in on us being one big happy family doesn’t mean you can’t go another way.”

“I don’t know.” She hadn’t been ready for any of this, and she had an unyielding knot of emotion in her throat. “I can’t decide that right now.”

“Nebula is unpredictable,” Drax said. “Children do better when they’re given consistency.” The surface of his face was calm—Drax showed buffoonery more readily than he showed grief—but Gamora had an idea of what Mantis would have picked up off him right then. If all this was going to be hard on him, he was refusing to show it to her, one warrior’s courtesy to another.

“We are very inconsistent,” Mantis said, her antennae drooping.

“We can’t be worse than Thanos,” Gamora said. “And he’s nothing if not consistent.”

“So there you go,” Rocket said. “We’re gonna be better than a genocidal maniac. Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we gotta name it.”

Drax produced a handheld pad. “Since the announcement of Gamora’s pregnancy, I have downloaded an extremely large file of possible baby names.”

Mantis clapped her hands. “Ooh, I love those!”

“Dude,” Peter said, “she was bleeding like crazy and you were looking up top baby names?”

“It’s called multitasking,” Drax said solemnly. “I worried with my mind and typed with my fingers.” He tilted the pad in Peter’s direction. “Look, they’re in alphabetical order and listed with their attendant meanings.”

“You should pick something badass,” Rocket said to Gamora. “Like a name that means ‘don’t fuck with me, ’cause I got a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth godparents and a mom who could slice and dice you in under three seconds. Plus maybe another mom with serious crazy eyes.’ Actually, go with that name exactly. We’ll just call the kid Slice for short.”

“I don’t hate that,” Peter said.

Gamora felt fractured and crumbling, like another word of this would make her break down into messy, ridiculous tears; it was like she loved them all so much she’d let them handle her heart directly, and they were, against all odds, being impossibly gentle with it. And yes, irritating. But there were so many worse things to be than that. She smiled and felt her lips shaking.

“I’ll remember Slice as a possibility,” she said.

But none of that, however much it helped her otherwise, brought her any closer to knowing what to do about Nebula. That night, she lay in her bunk with one palm resting against her stomach.

She felt nothing. She didn’t even know if it was possible to feel any stirring this early. She forced her hand down to her side and dug her fingers into the sheets.

Nebula had already chosen not to stay. The child might not make any difference to her. Obviously Nebula had never spoken of wanting one.

Their couplings had been fierce, ruthless, and degrading. Sometimes they hadn’t even had the luxury of a bed, and they’d fucked against bulkheads and on filthy bloodstained floors; she’d had no reason back then to think that this was anything that deserved even the smallest measure of comfort. It hadn’t even been about pleasure. She’d used Nebula the way she’d used intoxicants, before Thanos had rewired her body to resist them—sex was jus a way of taking advantage of internal chemistry to blot out her mind.

Hard and fast. Orgasms optional and rare. She remembered Nebula, still clothed, rubbing herself against Gamora’s raised thigh. She’d had her hand shoved down between Gamora’s legs, her fingers stiff and brutal, and she’d wrung some brittle climax from her and left her with bruises she’d felt for days. She remembered her mouth on Nebula’s cunt, the way she’d licked at the surprising bitterness there until she’d found herself with a craving for it.

And one of those encounters had led to this. To a child. Maybe her hopes for any of this would be higher if she’d known exactly which time it had been, if she could have felt there was some tenderness in it somewhere.

She was grateful for the soft knock at her door. It let her box up those memories for now.

“Come in.”

It was Peter, looking sleep-rumpled and unusually serious. “I was awake. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk.”

“Do I usually want to talk?” But she drew her feet up and gestured for him to sit down at the other end of her bed. She felt more comfortable like this than she ever would have thought, lying on her back, exposed and vulnerable, with another person in her space. He even had the advantage of the angle. She looked at him over the peak of her raised knees. “Almost every planet draws a line at it, Peter. She was supposed to be my sister. It really doesn’t bother you that I—” She stopped. It wasn’t like she wanted to get into specifics.

“Gamora, we’re _us_. We’re the Guardians of the Galaxy, not some family with two point five kids and a dog. We probably wind up breaking a couple laws every day before we even have breakfast.”

Gamora shook her head. That was a joke, not an answer.

He rubbed his hand across the stubble on his face, shrugging like he saw the problem but didn’t have anything better to offer her—he burned through jokes like fuel. “I don’t know what else to tell you. If anyone fucked up what family was supposed to mean to you, that was Thanos, not you. You and Nebula—you were just making incestuous lemonade out of some really fucking sour lemons. Besides, _we’re_ family, and I would seriously have sex with you right now if you wanted to.”

She laughed, and he leaned over and planted a soft kiss on one of her knees.

“_Should _I keep it?” Gamora said suddenly.

He shrugged. “Do you want to?”

“I have no idea what I want.” She closed her eyes. “I never imagined that he’d left me able to carry a child. Maybe he knew that as long as I was with him, my body wouldn’t risk it.”

“Man, your biology is like a guy’s worst nightmare,” Peter said. “Ten years post-hookup, you’ve totally forgotten her name, and then bang, hey, you’re going to be a father.”

“Peter, you’re not helping.”

“Hey, I helped earlier.” He leaned back against the wall. “Just because you didn’t think you’d be able to have a kid doesn’t mean you have to go through it with it. Or that you have to have _this _kid.”

It was that last part that pulled it all into focus for her. Because she did, she realized, want _this _child, this unexpected, unlikely, half-unwanted creature smuggled out from under their father’s nose, this new life made in the shadow of a man who wanted to place a stranglehold on the universe until all its breeding and all its dying went exactly as he wished. Maybe spite was a poor reason to have a child, but at the moment it was the only feeling she was sure of.

Maybe she was halfway sure of another thing: she wanted she and Nebula to have made something good together.

“No,” she said softly, “it should be this one.”

***

It took her a month to contact Nebula. Cowardice, plain and simple.**  
**

In the end, she sent a short video message, and she kept it straightforward rather than kind; it was impossible to predict, anyway, how Nebula would respond to Gamora trying to be nice to her. She still remembered that last hug, with Nebula stiff and wooden in her arms, unsure of what to do with any gesture that wasn’t at least half attack. And the truth was that she didn’t know her sister well enough to try anything else.

She recorded herself sitting on her bed, the new curve to her stomach visible underneath her tunic. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “It has to be yours—there’s never been anyone else. I’m planning on keeping it, if I’m really able to carry it to term. There have already been… complications.”

Rocket had given her greater flexibility along her pelvis and stomach, but none of them had known enough to predict how the changed hormones of pregnancy would interact with her nano-chemical enhancements. Two weeks of nearly constant vomiting had pissed her off and given her an extremely short temper for Drax and Mantis waxing rhapsodic about the miracle of life.

“You need to go to a _doctor_,” Peter had said.

“I have Rocket.”

“Rocket’s not a doctor! Yeah, sure, he can patch you up, but he’s also a _raccoon _who collects artificial limbs! He said you should go ahead and do a couple of shots of whiskey every day to get the baby to calm down!”

“I don’t want a doctor,” she’d said, walking away then because sometimes with Peter that was the only one to end a conversation.

She’d lain on a cold exam room table before while people in surgeon’s gowns had appraised her. She didn’t want to do that ever again.

“I don’t know if it’s going to work out,” Gamora said. “But I thought you deserved to know it was happening. In case you wanted to be here.”

She breathed in. Half the smells on the _Milano _vaguely nauseated her now.

“I want you to be here,” she said.

***

Nebula didn’t come. Instead, she waited. And waited.

Sometimes—when she couldn’t resist the weakness in her mind, when she had to fuss at it like a scab—she wondered what Gamora pictured her doing. Did she think that Nebula had followed in her footsteps and found some dissolute group of idiots to keep her company? Did she think Nebula had, like her, turned all _steadfast _and _wholesome_?

_There’s never been anyone else_, Gamora had said.

For Nebula there had been. She’d stopped caring a long time ago what was done with her body; it was an easy way to get credits without drawing too much attention to herself. There were always people who found her kind of tampered-with flesh exciting, who salivated over it and were willing to pay. Being disgusting—pruriently disgusting—had its base rewards. But even back on the _Sanctuary_, with no use for money, she’d fucked.

Gamora had never treated her like a sister, and Nebula had never treated her like a lover.

Except now she’d fathered Gamora’s child, so Gamora’s definition of them had won in the end. Chalk up one more victory for daddy’s favorite.

But then she thought of how Gamora had held her hand against her stomach as she’d said, _It’s yours_; this thing inside her belonged to them both. They’d never shared anything before. Thanos had made them sisters and he’d been the one to decide what that meant, that cauldron-boil of hatred and envy. He’d made sure they were never equal. But he hadn’t been in bed with them. Whatever else this was, it was theirs—and she had some claim to it. 

Gamora was vulnerable now, her body swollen and cumbersome, her balance impaired. She might need more protection than her buffoon friends could provide.

And Gamora had asked for her. Nebula hadn’t had much practice defending herself against being needed, _wanted_.

So she found Gamora on Kefflin, a warring desert world that had apparently hired the so-called Guardians of the Galaxy to defend their central water-synthesizing plant from any collateral damage before Kefflin’s reinforcements arrived.

It was hot, and the heat had never put Nebula in a good mood: her skin cooked against the metal plates of her body. She strode across the white alkali plains, listening to her bootheels crunch in the salt.

Gamora was more heavily pregnant now. Nebula knew they made clothing specifically tailored to accommodate that kind of growth, but Gamora was only wearing an oversized Terran-cut shirt that Nebula guessed had been Quill’s contribution. Her trousers showed signs of hackwork repair, stitched and patched with additional material.

“Shouldn’t you be inside?” she called to Gamora.

Gamora put her hand over her eyes, cutting some of the glare. “Shouldn’t you have been here two months ago?”

“Yeah,” Quill said. He was wearing his red-eyed mask, and Nebula couldn’t judge his expression. “Where I come from, when a girl knocks up her sister, she steps up and does the right thing.”

The fox intervened: “But seeing as you’re here, grab a gun. Or at least look scary in the other direction.”

She settled into place beside Gamora, noting the way Drax, the gray-skinned one, moved to make room for her. She pumped a fresh charge into her weapon and said, “You’ve looked better.”

“I’m fine.”

“You have an embryo inside you,” Nebula said. “It’s parasitic and it’s sapping your strength.”

“Hey!” Quill said, sounding genuinely affronted. “The kid can hear you, you know. We’ve been playing it music and everything.”

“You mean you’ve just been playing your music, as always, and Gamora has been in the room.”

“It’s an important part of the pregnancy process!”

“We also have an entire carton of her people’s prenatal vitamins,” Drax said. “You can tell by the way her hair has remained incredibly glossy.”

“It was a little bit of work balancing out how some of the nanite mods,” Gamora said, not looking at her. “But it’s done now. I don’t even get morning sickness anymore. If you wanted to comfort me, you should have come sooner.”

“I’m not the one you would ask for comfort,” Nebula said.

A muscle in Gamora’s cheek twitched just a little. “No. You’re not. But I asked for _you_. So there must have been something I wanted more.”

“This is awkward,” the fox said.

“I am Groot.”

“Yeah, I hope we get attacked soon too.”

“Maybe you should give up castigating for me not having come earlier and be grateful that I came at all,” Nebula said in a low voice. Why did they have to do all of this in front of Gamora’s little audience of spectators? “Having a child wasn’t at the top of my to-do list.”

Gamora exhaled through her teeth. “Right. You’re going to kill Thanos. How’s that working out for you?”

“I’m accumulating funds.” She cast another look over Gamora’s body, hopefully swiftly enough that Gamora wouldn’t know she’d even glanced over, and said, “And it’s a good thing, too, since it seems like I can’t trust you to take care of yourself. You need new clothes. And from the way you’re standing, your boots are too tight. Your feet are swollen.”

“We have incoming,” Gamora said, ignoring her. She drew her sword, activating some kind of shimmering field around it at the same time.

“Your fighting won’t be up to your standards.”

“Nebula. Shut up.” Her fine white teeth pressed into her lower lip.

She was beautiful. Nebula had never had the luxury of thinking about the universe in those terms; she’d always needed to weigh things by their usefulness, not how much she liked looking at them. But she had spent her whole life looking at Gamora: longing, hoping, fearing, hating, needing, wanting. She was like a flash bright enough that she’d burned herself onto Nebula’s eyes, the shape of her like a ghost even in the dark half a galaxy away. Red-violet hair—glossy, yes—and smooth fern-colored skin marked with traces of silver where Thanos had broken and artfully repaired her.

Nebula had never left a single scar on perfect Gamora. But now she had marked her completely; she was the source of this total reworking of Gamora’s body, this immense change that Gamora could apparently only barely bring herself to accommodate.

She aimed at the approaching winged beasts. Birds of prey, genetically engineered to have diamond-sharp wings; they homed in on their targets and cut through them like soft cheese. Dumb and deadly.

“She’s right about the clothes, you know,” Quill said. “I mean, I said that earlier. Not that I mind you wearing mine, but seriously, we can just swing by the nearest intergalactic K-Mart and get you something with some serious stretch.” He fired off a blast that took a wing off one of the birds and sent it careening, crookedly, into its brethren. “_Bam_. Two birds, one stone.”

“Your weapon does not fire stones,” Drax said.

“It’s an _expression_.”

“Rocks would be very primitive against this creature. They wouldn’t even scratch its hide.”

“Do we have to do this every time?” Gamora said.

“Well,” the fox said, “no sense breaking a habit.”

Nebula pulled the trigger, taking one of the birds straight through the eye with a plasma blast. The impact knocked it backwards, its outstretched wings crashing into the beasts on either side of it.

“Okay,” Quill said, “now certain people are just showing off.”

“That one’s getting closer,” Gamora said. “And coming in high.” She grabbed an exposed roof beam and hoisted herself up—once, Nebula knew, it would have been a graceful, seamless movement, and now she accomplished it only with a grunt and a hand at the small of her back. But she did, Nebula saw, accomplish it; she was grudgingly impressed by that. Gamora stood waiting on the flat ledge, her sword poised straight and true.

The rest of them fired in concert at the bird, but this one was more agile and its metallic feathers were more resistant. Even when their shots landed, they didn’t do more than ruffle it.

“What does your sword have to offer that a gun doesn’t?” Nebula shouted up to Gamora.

“Persistence,” Gamora called down. “It’s a longer blow. I’ll put all my strength into it and cut the lead bird in two—you concentrate on the others.”

“Got it.” The fox picked up a gun Nebula was surprised didn’t crush him beneath its weight. “Make sure not to fall off the roof, that’d be really embarrassing.”

“Explain to me why any of this is worth risking your life over,” Nebula said bitterly, glancing up again to see Gamora’s silhouette against the sky.

“First of all, they’re paying us,” Quill said, firing again. “And secondly, we’re the Guardians of the Galaxy, so when we _don’t _take jobs like this, it looks we’re just being dicks and refusing to help out. And Jane and John Q. Public over here didn’t exactly sign up to lose all their drinking water just because the assholes in their government got their panties in a twist. So in general we’re in favor of people not pointlessly dying of thirst.”

“And they’re paying us,” the fox said. “He mentioned that, but it kind of got lost in all the heroic stuff. Like, they’re paying us a _lot_.”

“I want a cut.”

“Nobody asked you to be here!”

“I did,” Gamora said from the roof.

“Well, nobody asked her to pitch in!”

“Uh, technically you did, Rock.”

“Freaking unbelievable.” The fox blasted a hole through one of the more distant birds.

Gamora let loose a battle cry, a more full-throated one than Nebula had ever heard from her before, and Nebula spun without meaning to, watching as Gamora threw herself behind her super-charged blade and cleaved the oncoming bird in two, beak to tailfeathers. Ivory-colored blood spattered her, and Nebula could see traces of her own injuries, as well; the beast’s feathers had grazed her even as its body had parted around her sword.

Nebula’s pulse seemed to reverberate throughout her whole body. She wanted them away from these birds, off this rock entirely. No amount of money could be worth this.

It was only after another grueling hour that the last of the birds fell from the sky.

“You think we could eat one of those?” the fox said, eyeing one of the enormous corpses.

“I have eaten them before,” Drax said. “They taste like chicken, but if the chicken were made of gasoline.”

“So no, then,” Nebula said. She kept her eye on Gamora’s descent from the rooftop, her breath catching slightly as Gamora seemed to place her foot in empty air. Even when she was on the ground, there wasn’t much relief to be had. Some of the lacerations were severe.

Nebula saw no point in arguing with her. She knew from long experience how fruitless that could be. She turned instead to Quill: “What right did you have to put her in the thick of something like this?”

“What right did I have to _stop _her?” He deactivated his mask. His pale eyes were bright with anger. “Are you seriously telling me you think me being captain means _shit _to anybody here?”

“It’s an honorary title,” Drax said.

“I can’t order Gamora around,” Quill continued, “and she won’t listen to me, but I’ve at least been here while you were off who the hell knows where doing who the hell knows what. So don’t give me any of this bullshit about how _I’m _the problem here. Shit, if the competition for universe’s worst parent wasn’t so steep around here—”

“Peter,” Gamora said. She put her hand on his arm. “It’s all right.”

“Yeah,” he said, exhaling. “Whatever.”

“If you’re done scolding me,” Nebula said, “I’d like to see to Gamora. I’m good at patching up wounds.” She tried to keep her face expressionless. The last thing she wanted was to let him know that he had landed a blow after all. Showing pain was just another luxury meant for someone else.

***

Back on the ship, Gamora let Peter deal with Nebula because as rankled as he was by her at the moment, his anger was gentle compared to hers. She knew what she needed to know, which was what room Peter would give out; there was just one empty one anyway.

She made her way there only after she imagined almost everyone would be asleep.

“I guess you’re speaking to me again,” Nebula said.

There was only one chair. Gamora had to sit down carefully. She didn’t know that she was speaking to her, actually—all this proved, she wanted to say, was that she was willing to be near her again.

She didn’t know if she could even come close to explaining how she’d felt over the last few months, with her body, her first and most finely-honed weapon, rebelling beneath her, turning soft and needy and unreliable. She’d staked her life on their child, and she’d been scared out of her mind. She’d turned _weak_—and weakness needed to be concealed, not admitted to. Somewhere at the bottom of her mind, she still thought that. This vulnerability, this fleshiness, this constant reminder of someone else’s hold on her body—it all took her back to a time when Nebula had been her only ally. Without her, Gamora had felt the fear and panic, the stale wash of adrenaline, closing around her throat like a noose. Nebula could have understood all that. _Should _have understood all that.

But Nebula had left her. Not alone, but _singular_, without anyone else with her same history.

And every day, without her, Gamora had had to choose, again, to want this. They wondered why she wouldn’t go to a doctor, why she wouldn’t buy those absurd garments—and the truth was she could carry this child only by doing her best to ignore it.

The prenatal vitamins had been an ridiculous compromise, because after weeks of sickness and fierce intermittent cramps of pain, after weeks of her refusing any help but Rocket’s, Peter had set them down on Xandar and said she was killing herself, and she had to either let them get her something—“some drugs, a midwife, shit, even one of those checklists of what not to eat”—or she had to figure out if she wanted an abortion. Because otherwise, he’d said, they were all scared shitless she was going to die. And she couldn’t.

And Peter had been white-faced and Mantis had had tears in her eyes and Drax had said he would get whatever she asked, that she wouldn’t even have to step off the ship—

So she’d gotten the damn prenatal vitamins. Drax was right about the effect they’d had on her hair. And they’d quelled the worst of the cramps. It was something.

She wanted a child. She even wanted this child. But she hated this pregnancy more than anything else her body had ever gone through. And she’d wanted Nebula and Nebula hadn’t been there.

She said, “Were you angry with me?” A stupid question. Anger had always been a part of them. “Did you ignore me because that was fair, because I didn’t help you enough when we were younger?”

Nebula jerked back. “No. I’ve given up thinking we can get to even.” She looked somewhere over Gamora’s shoulder. “I just don’t know how to raise a child.”

“That goes without saying. I don’t know either.”

“The tree’s still alive.”

“He’s a collective effort. That’s how I’d bring up our child too.” She raised her chin a little, letting her know that she’d chosen her words deliberately. She just didn’t know whether it was an offer or a plea.

Nebula pretended to ignore her. “I talked to your bug.”

“You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you don’t know anyone’s name.”

“Quill. Drax. Groot. Rocket. Mantis.” She looked at Gamora, her eyes hard and mocking. “Yours doesn’t seem to come to mind.”

Sometimes she didn’t know why she bothered.

“Fine. What did Mantis say?”

“That you missed me.” She made a scoffing sound that was like a twig snapping far down in her throat. “The only reason you ever wanted me to stay was out of pity.”

“That’s not true.”

And how had Mantis known, anyway, that Gamora had missed her sister? Gamora avoided even grazing her, as much as she could on such a small ship, and she’d never said anything. She didn’t want anyone else knowing more about her feelings than she did. It made her uneasy to realize Mantis had known regardless.

Gamora held on tightly to the arms of her chair. “You could have come here out of pity,” she said, keeping her voice neutral and free of hope. “Because I asked you to and I’m—” She made a face. “Because I’m practically infirm at the moment.”

“Those war birds didn’t think so.”

“Well, I feel that way, no matter what I do. I’ve been trying to keep control, but—”

“But you’ve never had your body change this much,” Nebula said. “You’re not used to it.”

Gamora had expected bitterness in her voice, sharp as licorice root, but she didn’t find it; if anything, she thought there was relief, as if Nebula were glad to have something concrete to offer her.

“No,” she said slowly, carefully. “I’m not.”

Nebula tilted her head, the way she always did when one of the data processors installed in her brain was running particularly quickly. “That’s why you haven’t replaced your clothes. You should. All you’re doing now is ruining what you’ll still want once all this is over. But no—you want to pretend that everything’s still the same. It’s not. You need new boots, and Quill says you won’t go to a doctor.”

“You know why I won’t. _You _wouldn’t.”

“No. But I’m a daughter of Thanos, and a rogue, and a criminal. You’re a galactic hero. A Nova Corps darling. You’re not going to walk into a well-lit hospital on Xandar and find a surgeon’s sold you back to Thanos or decided to add some extra parts.”

Even this was nothing the others hadn’t been saying to her for months—but hearing it from Nebula, who knew exactly, in excruciating detail, everything she had to fear, made it sink in a little further.

“And even if you won’t go,” Nebula said, sprawling out, her knees wide, “you can still fix your boots. Unless you’re afraid some cobbler is going to trade your feet in for hooves.”

“It’s hard to remember why I missed you.”

“Don’t hurt yourself trying.” Nebula swung her feet to the floor. She walked to Gamora and then knelt down by her chair. Her capable fingers—enhanced reflexes, increased motor skills by 31%—unknotted the broken and reworked ties of Gamora’s pants. “There. Now you have more room for it. The baby.”

Gamora reached out and rested her palm against the side of Nebula’s skull, feeling the slight oiliness of her skin and the little flecks of scar tissue. Divots had been taken out of her for neural microsurgery—remove a tiny portion of scalp, drill directly through the bone, and thread in the wires. Nebula had a sort of spicy unwashed scent to her, like she’d been too long between showers.

She felt breakable, there in Gamora’s hand, no matter how reinforced she had been. She was warm and familiar and, above all else, beautifully separate. Gamora was so damn sick and tired of only thinking endlessly about her own body, about the taking-over of it, about what she had to do for it, about what she wasn’t doing enough of.

She wanted to be selfish in thinking about someone else.

She said, “Is that the only reason you stayed away? That you don’t know what to do with children?”

Nebula stared straight ahead, at Gamora’s exposed skin, and didn’t really answer her. “Why does it matter?”

“Because it does.” A fake answer for a fake answer. And she’d learned that pointless “because” tactic from Peter.

“I would have come sooner if I’d known you were being this stupid.”

“Nebula—”

“If you want to sleep here,” Nebula said, rising, the movement fluid in a way Gamora now couldn’t hope to imitate, “you can. If you don’t, you should leave. I’m going to bed.”

Gamora stood, too, and noticed the way Nebula’s hands came forward automatically to brace her forearms and give her leverage.

Gamora said, “Do you want me to have this child?”

Nebula was still. Gamora could see, over her shoulder, a poster for a weapons manufacturer Rocket was especially fond of: gun schematics in blue and white.

“Yes,” Nebula said, and turned quickly away, getting into bed and facing the wall.

Gamora got in beside her sister, her back to Nebula’s so her stomach would have more room. At some point in the night, she felt Nebula shift, rolling over and scooting close, until her body cradled Gamora’s.

***

Nebula had already spent enough time with Gamora’s friends enough to learn that their endless bickering and quibbling and ear-splitting music would not—or at least not easily—break into open combat. That meant she could treat it like it was under the same tense truce as home. Once again, here she was with a bunch of jackasses chosen as family by someone else. It was comfortable. If she cared about her comfort.

She evaluated them.

Mantis could be cowed into doing anything, which meant Nebula seldom interacted with her. She didn’t especially enjoy terrifying someone with all the ferocity of a newborn fawn, but she couldn’t imagine any particular gift for niceness. She kept her distance instead.

Groot was a sapling, immature but tolerable. Nebula avoided him too. She already knew she wouldn't have a talent for motherhood; she didn't need to rush into demonstrating it.

Rocket was the easiest for her to deal with. He didn’t ask for niceness, and he didn’t give it. And he knew how to hotwire all their body-mods—he treated it casually, like repair work was repair work whether it was on a plasma rifle or in the faulty wiring of her optic nerve. As far as Nebula could tell, he’d been the one doing most of the work keeping Gamora on her feet this whole time.

“Or getting her back up on them,” he said one day, after Nebula alluded to this. “She tell you how all of us—her included—found out she was pregnant? She burst open like a melon hit with a hammer. All that synthetic shit Thanos put in her worked like a too-tight belt at a holiday dinner.” He held his paws together, quivering them a little, and then suddenly pulled them apart. “Ker-splat. So not a great start. But yeah, even if she won’t do the maternity clothes thing, I did what I could to give her a maternity body.” He scrutinized her. “I kinda figured she didn’t drop any of that in her little ‘come paint the nursery’ message, or you’d have come running sooner.”

Nebula wanted to deny that it would have made any difference, but instead she said, “She doesn’t like showing any weakness. Not to me.”

“I wouldn’t say she’s wild about showing it to anybody. But just as a tip, one buddy to another—”

“You’re not my buddy.”

“Fine. One fucked-up science experiment to another. If you’re actually around, you can ask her what’s going on with her.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Nebula said, stalking off.

Drax would have been almost painless had he not kept passing on important life lessons to her about parenting.

“You will want to take the child on outings,” he said. “And sometimes buy them an ice cream or the charred leg of a desert weasel as a special treat. There are traditions for various birthdays. On the first, you should—” And on and on until he stopped abruptly and said, “After that I don’t remember what it is you’re supposed to do.”

Nebula had only been putting up with him as the price for good light while she worked on improving their protein synthesizer, but then she put down the small screwdriver. “We can look it up,” she said after a pause.

“Yes,” Drax said. “We can do that. As I did with the baby names.” And then, of course, he had to read them to her, in alphabetical order, until Nebula thought she was going to have to stick the screwdriver through his ear to get him to stop.

And then there was Quill, who loved Gamora.

“I can’t believe you got her to agree to a doctor,” he said. “I was on her about that for months.”

“Maybe you’re just not very persuasive.”

“Or maybe she had trouble figuring out for sure if she wanted the kid until you finally got off your ass and showed up.”

Nebula didn’t need to justify herself to him—she couldn’t think of anything so phenomenally unimportant—but she’d counted the number of shirts he’d turned over to Gamora. He was soft-edged. The kind of person you would choose, however reluctantly, to raise your child. If you knew someday you’d be gone.

She said, “I’m not what she needs.”

“See, actually, you are, because again: doctor.”

“I don’t fit in with your cozy little family. I’m a murderer and a liar and a whore and a thief, and not just on Thanos’s orders. She wants me here because we fucked. Right now, she’s sentimental enough to think that makes us a love story. Being sisters didn’t work out, so she thinks we’ll try this.” The space around her eyes itched, where the glands and ducts there had been removed. “But it won’t work either.”

“Mm-hm,” Quill said, unimpressed. “Bullshit. She’s still your sister. And if you really think that, why’d you come in the first place?”

“Because she asked me to.” She didn’t know why she was telling him the truth. “Because right now I matter to her.”

“For what it’s worth,” Quill said, “I’ve killed and lied and whored and thieved, and I never even _met _Thanos. So you fit in fine. And if you run out on Gamora, I will do everything I can to piss you off long-distance, including asking her to marry me so I can be your dick brother-in-law.” He clapped his hand on her shoulder as he left. Nebula somehow refrained from stabbing him for it.

***

Gamora rolled over to face her sister. They were in her room that night, and the darkness was the kind of twilight blue-gray that turned Nebula into mostly shadows except where the metal framework around her eye socket caught the little bit of light. Gamora reached for her, running one hand up and down Nebula’s arm.

Nebula awoke instantly. All Thanos’s children were light sleepers by necessity. “What?”

Gamora didn’t like admitting that she’d just had a bad dream. She should have gotten up and gone out to the kitchen to have some of the disgusting warm milk Drax had been trying to talk her into trying.

But Nebula knew anyway. Of course she did: the bed was soaked with her sweat, and the fear-scent there was sharp and sour and undeniable. She brought the lights up a few degrees.

“You had a nightmare,” Nebula said. “Thanos?”

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d dreamt of anything else. “He took the child. Not to kill it—to raise it. He said… that he would love it like he loved me.” Her throat twitched, as if she might gag.

Nebula put her arm across Gamora’s body, warily, and curled her fingers against Gamora’s back. “We wouldn’t let him.”

“When have we ever stopped him?”

“You know what we would do,” Nebula said, her whisper low, her breath hot against Gamora’s shoulder. “If we had to.”

Yes, she knew. She knew what she would do to any child of hers before she handed it over to her father. She wouldn’t have admitted that to anyone else, and no one else would have known. She was a hero now, they said, and there were things heroes didn’t do—just like they didn’t love their sisters. Not like this.

Peter was right. Things between her and Nebula had been broken a long time ago, and they’d healed badly and in ways she knew other people wouldn’t always understand.

Nebula’s arm tightened around Gamora, and she pulled herself closer, until her flat, hard-muscled body was against Gamora’s rounded stomach. “I can go, you know. I can find Thanos and put an end to it all. Our child would be safe.”

The expectation in her voice was clear. She was ready for Gamora to say yes.

All Nebula’s imperfections had been carved away from her, replaced with hardened, shining bits Thanos had decided she needed to be worthy of Gamora. She knew that now, left to her own devices, Nebula would take a knife to whatever weaknesses she saw in herself, because that was all she knew, because it was easier than learning to live with them. Nebula would die for her, for their child. Like her whole life was just one more thing to be cut off and tossed onto the fire.

“I don’t want that.” She grabbed Nebula’s hand and forced it around to her belly, so Nebula could feel the slight, strange movements of the baby inside her. She knew she was holding her too tightly, but she couldn’t seem to make herself let go.

Nebula said, “It’s kicking.”

“Because you’re threatening to leave it.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

Gamora shook her head. “I’m always going to have bad dreams, Nebula. We both are. I can live with them. I don’t need to get rid of them so badly that I’d risk losing you.”

Nebula kissed her. It was new—frighteningly new, maybe only the fourth or fifth kiss of Gamora’s life—and they were clumsy at it. She still didn’t always know how to get her new body to do what she wanted it to. Nebula’s mouth had a sour, harsh taste, like smoke and salt; the kiss didn’t make Gamora burn, but the way Nebula grunted as she shifted against her, the way her fingers scrabbled over Gamora’s belly, did. She wanted this to happen.

She let Nebula turn her onto her back. Nebula lowered herself down between Gamora’s legs and pushed up the long shirt she’d been wearing, making cool air suddenly play about Gamora’s thighs. Nebula licked up against her underwear, laving at her through the cotton, and then she pulled those out of the way too, rolling them down the length of Gamora’s legs until they tangled up around her ankles.

Nebula said, “I’m still your sister,” and there was a challenge in her voice. It was the way she’d said, _I bested you in combat_; unsure of her victory unless she could claim it.

As if Gamora had any intention of arguing with her about that. “Yes.” She rubbed one foot against the other, freeing herself from her underwear so she could lift her legs. She laid her heels against Nebula’s back. “You’re a lot of things to me.”

Nebula froze, just for a moment, and then bent down so quickly the movement was a blur. She put rough hands under Gamora’s thighs and lifted her, spreading her out, and then she licked the hot wet seam of Gamora’s cunt. She was the one making noises, like it was all happening to her. Gamora could hear that fierce pleasure even over the sound of her own ragged breath. Nebula was better at this then she’d been the last time they’d lain together. She’d been with other people, then; Gamora hoped at least some of them had been good to her.

She wanted to see Nebula, any part of her, but her own idiotically abundant flesh got in the way. She’d have to raise herself up higher—but then Nebula stroked her belly again, the curve of it, and Gamora could see her fingers.

When Gamora came, her hips rocking back and forth, she caught Nebula’s hand in hers and held it hard. Nebula stayed between her legs a little longer, riding her own hand until her jaw tightened and her muscles pulled up tense like a rubber band. It was the longest orgasm Gamora had ever seen her have, as if Nebula only now trusted that they had the time to do this right.

When that was done, Nebula propped herself up on her elbow, not reclaiming her other arm. “You taste different.”

“It’s probably the hormones,” Gamora said. She was panting a little, and she could feel the prickle of sweat in the hollow of her throat. She traced the side of Nebula’s face, following the soft curve of her ear. “Is it bad?”

“No. Just stronger.”

“Let me taste you,” Gamora said, feeling a hot after-flash of desire at the purplish blush that spread across Nebula’s face. “Not if you’re embarrassed.”

“I don’t know why it matters,” Nebula said, almost grumpily. “I’ve done all of this before.” She looked at Gamora as she said it, as she reached down between her own legs. In the same low voice, she added, “I’m not like you. I’ve probably fucked more people than I’ve talked to. Does it bother you?” Her fingers between them, glistening.

The real answer was more complicated than she thought Nebula would accept, a blend of impatience and jealousy and sadness. She closed her mouth around Nebula’s fingers, sliding her tongue up them, sucking at them. And this—this taste was everything she remembered. But the look on Nebula’s face, so soft and stunned—that was new.

Gamora lifted her head. “It doesn’t bother me,” she said softly. “But I like being the one to make you blush.”

Nebula’s exhalation might have been a laugh. “Don’t get used to it.”

“No. We can get used to things.”

Nebula was quiet and then she said, “Can the baby really hear me?”

That was a blush too, Gamora was tempted to point out, but she restrained herself. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you dare tell anyone about this,” Nebula said, and she ducked her head down against Gamora’s stomach. Gamora could feel her lips moving.

It was delicate and strange, and it marked the first time in these months of hellish change that she’d felt comfortable in her own body, that she’d looked down at it and seen something beautiful. Nebula kissed her there, just once, and then moved back up to the pillow. There was a forbidding look on her face that didn’t at all stop Gamora from asking, “What did you say?”

Nebula’s flush only darkened. “I told Slice I wouldn’t really leave.”

They’d wind up using that name after all. It was her own fault for saying they could get used to things.

Gamora turned the lights back down, so they could settle in to sleep. She said, “Then Slice and I both believe you.”


End file.
